25 Tips To Make your Blog More Accessible For Readers

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is accessible by as many people as possible – Wikipedia.

Making your blog more accessible will help you get more readers which translates to success.

Here are 25 tips to make your blog more accessible for readers:

1. Large Fonts: Large fonts make it possible to read posts easily. You should not make it very big, anywhere between 12 and 14 points is fine.
2. Good Design: Good design is something you should focus before everything else. Nothing can be better than a well designed blog where the content gets attention.
3. Follow KISS: KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Do not make design complex, simple is better!
4. Dark Text On Light Background: Reading dark text on a lighter background is much easier and when selecting a theme for your blog, make sure it has dark text that’s readable on background.
5. Looooooooong Blogrolls: OK, blogrolls are great, they help you share your favourite blogs with readers, right? But there’s no use of blogroll with 30 links! Most people will find it, well long! So, keep it short.
6. Looooooooong Sidebars: I won’t say a word, you know how you feel when you see a long sidebar cluttered with all kinds of ads and links!
7. De-Clutter Sidebar: Clutter is irritating. Nothing can be more irritating than a sidebar that is cluttered with widgets, ads etc. Identify what’s important for you and keep only the best widgets.
8. Add Images To Articles: Images make articles look better and also attract focus towards important points.
9. Never, Ever Use Animations: Animations do only one thing well, distracting readers! Avoid animations inside articles.
10. Make Your Blog Fast: There’s no point in doing anything if you blog takes forever to load! Further Reading: How To Increase Page Loading Times Of Your Blog By 75%.
11. Use “Click Here”:  With every other blog having different design, there’s one thing that becomes a problem, finding links! In good old days, we had blue links and even most computer un-savy people could use them. So, if you have anything important to link to, try using “Click Here”. And by the bay, Click Here to subscribe to Blogging With Success so that you can get more tips like these straight inside your inbox!
12. Use Constant Link Color: Do not make every link of different color. It is best to have a constant link color across website.
13. Make Links Underline: Making links underlined will help to get attention to them.
14. Make Links Underline On Hover: Yes, it may seem odd to have links underline. And if you also think so, why not make them underline on hover? That would also be a nice effect! To do this, simple add this line to end of your style.css file in WordPress: a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
15. Optimize For Slow Connections: Everyone in the world does not have a broad band(yet), so try to keep page size under 500 kb. Further reading: How To Decrease Page Loading Times Of Your Blog By 75%.
16. Avoid Auto Plays: Auto playing music is nothing but an annoyance. And videos, they are even more. Most importantly, they take up lot of bandwidth which may cause visitors on slow connections to move away.
17. Add A Text To Speech Converter: An automatic text to speech converter can help a lot of people who might have difficulty reading your posts. I found two services that can do this for you: Odigo and iSpeech.
18. Make Content Column Wider: Anything more than 3 columns is an overkill. And if you are going to get a magazine theme, it is best to make it simple and non-puzzling!
19. Make Search Easier: Do not forget to place a “search” widget in your sidebar. Even if you are using Apture, a search widget is helpful as many people won’t know how to use it!
20. Make Navigation Easier: Make sure that your old posts and other important info is easy to find. As Daniel Scocco says, “Every post of your blog should be no more than one click away”
21. Make Subscription Links Visible: When people want to subscribe, they will look for easy methods to subscribe. Ensure that you have “Subscribe” links on every page and they are visible too!
22. Get Rid Of Captchas: Captchas are very annoying! Sometimes, the text is very hard to read and this may irritate the readers. Yes, I know you may get comment spam but there are better ways to fight comment spam without affecting user experience!
23. Get A Favicon: A favicon helps readers to find your blog in a big cluster of tabs. So, get 10 minutes and make a favicon for your blog.
24. Test In Different Browsers: I have learned this the hard way. What looks awesome in my Opera browser is often horrible in Internet Explorer and when dealing with clients, this is very irritating!(Nothing can annoy more than a “Design does not look good” from a client using Internet Explorer 6!) It is best to test design in different browsers. A good tool for this is Browser Shots.
25. Use Contact Forms: Yes, I know that email privacy is important but putting a simple image of your email address is not very user friendly! Please add a contact form to give people a less annoying(wait, it’s not annoying at all!) way to contact you!

Using these tips, you can easily make your blog more user friendly. It’s not necessary to use all of these but those which are necessary for your reader base should be added as soon as possible!

What other tips do you have to make your blog more accessible? Do not forget to share in comments.